Hacking What's up with Gateway and Online

[Kingfield]

Hey does anyone know what's up with Gateway and the Online functionality? Especially since the FAQ says that the games should retain online functionality.

I know it isn't meant to work at the moment, but does anyone know if they are planning to make it work, or whether it's actually impossible?

 

[0nethe]

Yeah, I am wondering the same thing. Hope they can fix it. n_n

 

[dehry]

Nintendo has a little bit more control over online services since the 3DS has a single friend code shared over all the games. They could have something in place to detect it online.


E: They do have the ability to block Mario Kart players without a v1.1 update so there is definitely some information being exchanged. All the gateway team has managed to do is break various security checks in the home screen, not the network. Just like with the iEvo,

 

[isaac52]

Part of me hopes they fix it, part doesn't. Hacks :G

 

[Wiki'd]

I have the card now but I have yet to test offline co-op, so to save me the trouble, does anyone know normal offline co-op games such as in New Super Mario Bros. 2 works with someone else having a legit or / and a non-legit version of the game?

As for the topic itself, I hope not. Piracy should be as far away from online as possible, and I am saying that because abusers tend to ruin the experience for all, though I hope I do hope one day eShop games / DLC will added as we can't access those contents otherwise.

 

[FAST6191]

I will leave it to others to speculate but I do have to note these online services that cater to embedded devices of known spec can be extremely picky about what they receive and how they handle it. All sorts of little things can happen that breaks it and I imagine that is what gateway face, mainly as that is what most people doing similar things with about every other online embedded device have faces, if they otherwise did not break it properly just to prevent these issues/gather a bit more data in private of course.

On the other hand there was once a mindset of "if you hack your device you lose online support" and it ran deep. Might be time to reconsider that.

 

[Pong20302000]

I will leave it to others to speculate but I do have to note these online services that cater to embedded devices of known spec can be extremely picky about what they receive and how they handle it. All sorts of little things can happen that breaks it and I imagine that is what gateway face, mainly as that is what most people doing similar things with about every other online embedded device have faces, if they otherwise did not break it properly just to prevent these issues/gather a bit more data in private of course.

On the other hand there was once a mindset of "if you hack your device you lose online support" and it ran deep. Might be time to reconsider that.

indeed

download and local play works fine tho

 

[Wiki'd]

indeed

download and local play works fine tho

Can you elaborate by what you mean with "download" working fine?

 

[Supernovakid]

Can you elaborate by what you mean with "download" working fine?

he means that if a person does not have the game, the person can download the data needed to play a short demo of the game with a person who actually has the game.

 

[Wiki'd]

he means that if a person does not have the game, the person can download the data needed to play a short demo of the game with a person who actually has the game.

Oh I see, thanks for letting me know, as I didn't know that was possible too.
Now if only eShop contents were 'dumped' one day, need for online would be irrelevant, at least for me.

 

[isaac52]

I will leave it to others to speculate but I do have to note these online services that cater to embedded devices of known spec can be extremely picky about what they receive and how they handle it. All sorts of little things can happen that breaks it and I imagine that is what gateway face, mainly as that is what most people doing similar things with about every other online embedded device have faces, if they otherwise did not break it properly just to prevent these issues/gather a bit more data in private of course.

On the other hand there was once a mindset of "if you hack your device you lose online support" and it ran deep. Might be time to reconsider that.

If this is the case it'll make me feel better about having 2 3ds units.

 

[meleaina]

What about streetpass stuff? will that work with gateway?

 

[Ryukouki]

What about streetpass stuff? will that work with gateway?

Yep, I tested it earlier today, no problems with street passing!

 

[Quicksilver88]

Well Pretty sure all cartridges have a unique ID so it wouldn't be very hard for Nintendo to just download the scene dumped roms and ban the dumped games ID from playing online (if they have the mechanism in place).....this could be overcome with some type of random spoofing of the game ID but we have to remember we are still so early in all this and honestly once gateway get to where you can run unsigned code with the device (which they claim is their goal) then a whole lot more becomes possible.....so far they have found the DS Profile buffer overflow exploit, and somehow hacked the catridge slot to 'accept' their hardware as an acceptable launch device and they have worked out the .sav file cloning from the onboard eeprom and somehow tricked the system into not caring about region and version details.....pretty great work so far in only a few months time...so I have high hopes for what they can accomplish because they should be able to do just about anything (on 4.5 units atleast) given the time to work thru the firmware kernel and its details....Nintendo has got to be pooping their pants....lol

 

[justinkb]

As far as we know, all game cartridges of the same game are indistinguishable. Not sure why you think they all have unique ids, that would be a huge hassle and increase in cost of mass production.

 

[dehry]

It's not too hard to add a couple of bytes with a unique game id in the ROM somewhere. Each 3DS has its own unique serial number, the same thing can be done with each game. Some little check when going online saying "I'm cartridge #xxxxxx on system #xxxxxxxxx" would identify the people using hacked systems/cartridges in the future and even be grounds for a ban.

 

[robo989]

It's not too hard to add a couple of bytes with a unique game id in the ROM somewhere. Each 3DS has its own unique serial number, the same thing can be done with each game. Some little check when going online saying "I'm cartridge #xxxxxx on system #xxxxxxxxx" would identify the people using hacked systems/cartridges in the future and even be grounds for a ban.

It's not hard on a game by game basis no. But it's hard in a mass production situation and would add substantially to cost. Why do you think serial numbers exist for PC software, they could just add that to the media?

Point about each console is invalid, this is done for anti-piracy reasons on a system wide basis. That is a cost that can be justified as it's a per console cost and each person has 1 for multiple games etc...look there's loads of obvious reasons, what you think is "possible", is not practical.

 

[justinkb]

The consoles themselves are hard and expensive to produce in the first, it makes sense to add unique identification to them.

Cartridges cost little more than "cents" to make with the quantities Nintendo puts out. Adding a unique id to each one would cost them too much per cartridge.

 

[Kingfield]

It's not too hard to add a couple of bytes with a unique game id in the ROM somewhere. Each 3DS has its own unique serial number, the same thing can be done with each game. Some little check when going online saying "I'm cartridge #xxxxxx on system #xxxxxxxxx" would identify the people using hacked systems/cartridges in the future and even be grounds for a ban.

Not sure if it woudl actually be 'hard' or not, but at the moment, no piece of software does anything like this. That's why CD keys, for example, are always external and you gotta manually enter them

 

[Apache Thunder]

I don't understand how some are saying programming unique IDs for each cartridge would be too expensive. They could easily have hardcoded a unique ID into the eeprom/save system or stored in the read-only boot code chip that handles the cartridge communication protocol. They can simply program their factory machines to code a different ID for each chip produced and they are then passed along in the production process to be soldered to the game board at a later stage in production.

It would serve that purpose so as to identify that game's serial to the online system. It's no more difficult then programming CD-Keys for Windows OS and using activation checks to prevent two from being activated at the same time on different machines (Lets pretend the activation cracks and piracy stuff is not a factor for this comparison).

Nintendo can then detect if two games are online that share the same ID. Then it's simple. both get banned and any future instance of a game/rom using that ID.

It's also possible game roms lack this ID completely since it could be stored in a different chip. Lack of ID equals auto rejection from any connection to Nintendo's online system.

That's not to say it's fool proof. Gateway could spoof that ID like one would spoof the region/firmware version. But it would be difficult to pull off since the online servers store all the valid game IDs and thus it would reject an ID that doesn't exist. Duplicates also get rejected and results in bans.

Remember how Microsoft can ban hacked Xbox hardware? I'm pretty sure Nintendo can do the same if they wanted to.